It astounds me that people can be this fed up and somehow not become radical socialists, at least fucking unionize god damn
like there's a whole book written specifically about why this would happen and how workers can fight back
this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
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It's extremely easy to mislead people who their enemy is when there is one group that has multiplicative magnitudes of wealth over the other
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WFH solves at least three of those problems, but only if our corporate lords allow it.
Wfh only benefits a pretty small subset of the population... Speaking as someone who can't work from home.
It still benefits you by greatly reducing traffic.
I work a graveyard shift so traffic doesn't really affect me. Which I'm sure is at least somewhat common among the people who can't wfh.
Yeah, I work in an underground lair in a barracks. It wouldn't benefit me either, so not much interest in supporting it. I'd rather we vote for faster escalators. Now that's something everyone can use.
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Multiple things can be true simultaneously,
You can hate all the shit you've got to deal with while acknowledging it's some of the least bad shit people have had to deal with in human history. Arguably the shit we deal with now could be considered the last great hurdle left to us by generations of getting rid of worse shit.
We've made a disease that was basically our natural predator go extinct in the wild, we've touched other worlds and reached the top and bottom of our own, we've gotten so efficient at work that we've started making strange collections of rocks do the mundane and mathematically tedious work for us.
What's left to us is taking our free time back, switching over to a cheaper power source than what we were using, pegging the bottom wrung wage floor to an automatically adjusting living standard ratio, and other fine tuned adjustments on big ideas others have already done the fighting and dying to set the foundations with.
We're not slaying dragons, we're banishing the last ghosts of bitter lords and merchants.
Exactly. Remember that time when the harvest failed, and you had to eat your pet dogs and your baby brother starved to death? Remember that time when your neighbour got a scratch in the woods and died from infection? Or how you all avoided old wife Johnson for two years because her husband got ~~pneumonia~~ the coughs and died gasping for air? Or that time two of your aunts died in childbirth? Remember how the most exciting thing to happen in your life was a traveler staying in your village and they told stories of huge wooden ships sailing on the seas? Remember how three townsfolk were mauled by a bear last year? Oh crap, you said it's name, better hope nobody heard you, or you'll get blamed for the next one!
How about just your regular day? Spending 8 hours a day housekeeping, cleaning your dirt floors, fetching water from the mostly-clean well or the slow-flowing bit of creek outside the village, baking bread in your castiron pot after gathering firewood, preserving food for winter and knowing you'll be eating old flour and salted meat/fish before christmas anyway, churning butter again because the batch you made last mondy is rancid already, etc etc etc.
Life sucks, but it sucked WAY harder in the past. I can heartely recommend doing a week of early-medieval reenactment, because nothing makes you apreciate modern life more than spending 6 hours of your day, every day, making a stew and some bread.
Remember
I am not that old, please.
stories of huge wooden ships sailing on the seas
Yeah seven seas at least!
I am extremely anxious after reading this post.
This is why they call it doomscrolling.
Learn when to walk away, if only for your own health. Even surrounding yourself with shitpost and meme communities can't keep it at bay, as you can see.
I would say the issue is that it is relatable. In most cases, I don't think people would be feeling the doom if they weren't affected (in this case, I don't think a healthy and happy person with a decent wage/job would feel anxious from this post).
Also even escapism (using media) isn't perfect both because old settings paint a picture of community/assurances that don't exist for the viewer, and even in dystopia something needs to drive the plot forward (well, somewhat less so with anything less focused on action/plot).
I mean I totally understand ignoring certain types of doom, for instance if MAD or an E.M.P. (/carrington event) happens I don't really see any "preparing" for that so I don't even bother thinking about it.
I don't think a healthy and happy person with a decent wage/job would feel anxious from this post)
No one is immune to anxiety, especially not when the main focus of a post is a failure to thrive and loss of time itself. Everyone ages.
That's why learning when to walk away is a crucial skill everyone needs to develop.
Learning to stay present and be ok with whatever happens is also another useful skill.
When a subject causes anxiety it is easy to get caught in an avoidance pattern instead of working through it and having a learning experience. Why does that subject cause the anxiety? There's usually some mental or emotional work there for you to ponder and work through over time.
put that anxious energy to use, organize and resist the exploitation of workers
That's why I became a failed musician and writer addicted to drugs, bummed around a while, got clean and now I just work for myself doing something I can stand, while being absolutely mesmerized by how awful people are. 😢
Glad you're clean now. That's no easy task.
Out of curiosity what's the thing you found you could stand?
There's a solution comrade
When this is the life they've built for you, what else do you have to lose but your chains.
I worry about this as well until I simply left to travel for three years. Working odd jobs here and there. Now I'm back in the wheel, but not forever. Break the chains.
You want to quit your job? Make friends and enemies? Organize a union.
Funny : Anon is from the US, but this exactly describes my brother in law's life too, over in China.
A third of the day to do chores? More like 1/8
honestly, 3 hours a day is still a lot if you don't have kids. If you have a newborn, I'd be surprised if you can manage it in just 8 hours.
because there are no jobs left
Is this hyperbole or nah
There are jobs. But the vast majority of them are shitty low paid jobs imo.
Depends on where anon's family is. A lot of small towns have no jobs left for the people graduating high-school. Some cities, like Detroit, have a lack of jobs.
well a lot of listings are just straight up fake because companies want the optics of having open job offers but don't actually want to hire people, and a huge chunk of jobs are either so out of the way that the commute would leave you without enough money to live on, or they require such absurd qualifications that basically no one is eligible.
A favourite is when programming jobs require 5 years of experience in a language that was made 3 years ago.
Not a hyperbole. Sometimes jobs are concentrated in few cities in a country.
Look, I get the sentiment. But objectively, humans that lived in the past, even just a few decades ago, had a much worse standard of living than today. Example: the polio vaccine was invented in 1955. So not even 100 years ago, the likelihood you’d end up paralyzed or even worse in an iron lung for the rest of your life was a real threat. People had a crap ton of kids not because they liked kids but because infant mortality was so high. So saying that we are living in the most prosperous time in human history is objectively true.
That said, yeah. Eat the rich. 100%.
Being born rich at any point is groovy even if you do die of polio at 32.
Most people who die from polio do so before they're 5.
And, for most of human history, just surviving was a real challenge. Half of all children died even up to the 1780s. And, if you lived, you were probably a serf, living in a dirt hut, wearing a tunic which was a long piece of cloth folded in half with a hole for the head.
Then, they had to spend nearly half the year working on their lord's land for free. They weren't paid wages, so the half year they spent doing jobs for their lord was time they weren't able to spend doing their own household tasks. That was just the "taxes" that they had to pay with labour. In their "free time" they had to do all the basic tasks like get firewood for their homes, mill their flour and bake their bread, spin cloth for their clothes, take care of their farm animals, tend their crops, etc. OTOH, they did get frequent religious holy days (holidays). But, a religious holiday didn't mean a completely free day. It was just one where you weren't expected to work on your lord's plantation. But, all your basic household tasks still needed doing.
The real difference is that peasants back then probably believed the priests who told them that the aristocracy were selected by a god. Many of them probably couldn't even conceive of a world where they could live like that. Meanwhile, in the modern world, we're told that Elon Musk and Bill Gates got where they were through smarts and hard work. We should know better. We should be taxing the ultra-rich into non-existence so that maybe we still spend 1/3 of our lives working, but at least there's a safety net when we get sick or injured.